Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/340

 326 PAPER READ BEFORE connection between service and cash, and that to a very large extent we are in fact the willing servants of anyone who wants our help. The truth is that the more useful a librarian can make his library to its frequenters, the more amusing and interesting it becomes to himself, and this seems to be the psychological explanation of the readiness of the great majority of modern librarians to initiate reforms, even at the cost of increasing the pressure of their own daily work. In our gloomier moments we call this course of conduct Making Rods for our own Backs, and if anyone asserts that the Panizzi Club is an organization direftly or indirectly de- signed to this end, it might be rather difficult to deny it. The best counterplea, indeed, would be to point out that the Club is also an organization for keeping the rods as far as possible in our own hands. The writers of the article in the c Contemporary Review,' to which ultimately we owe our existence, suggested that our little world of librarians could best be improved by means of a Royal Commission. There is one thing, and only one, certain to result from a Royal Commission the publication, in a more or less hole-and-corner manner, of a number of quires of unpleasant paper, unpleasantly printed and stitched together in an unpleasant blue cover, the whole eminently cheap production being usually of a size which precludes it from standing upright in any ordinary bookcase, and ranges with nothing but other unpleasant volumes of the same origin. In Blue-books of this kind there have been buried during the last few years an ambitious scheme for the re-afforestation of these islands, and